


Gunpoint

by Merixcil



Series: Whumptober 2019 [5]
Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, Pining, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 07:49:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25467286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Valery contemplates the value of the work he has left to finish
Series: Whumptober 2019 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1838356
Kudos: 1





	Gunpoint

Valery has found it in himself to beg for more than his fair share of what he’s gotten out of life. He’s always been desperate, always a centimetre too close to breaking for his own good. To hear people talk about him, you would be forgiven for thinking that that is what made him a good scientist, that desperate urge to push a little further and find out what lies beyond the curtain. 

But bullets? Guns are hardly difficult to find in the USSR, especially in Moscow. The turn of phrase may have been inspired but no one has ever has to beg for a bullet in this city. 

Looking out of his window to the street below, he sees the car that everyone for three blocks knows is driven by KGB agents, though mercifully most of his neighbours are blissfully unaware that he is the object of their observation. Or at least, Valery has to assume. He’s friendly with the old lady across the hall from him, she feeds the cat if he ever needs to get away for a couple of days, and he’s run into the boy who brings his morning paper on more than one occasion. Everyone else is just a face, he wouldn't know the first thing about what they suspect.

February is dawning cold and grey. There’s a cleanness to it that Valery can appreciate, something neat and pleasing in the way that with the heating off, his breath steams the window before his first cigarette of the day can do the job for him.

There is a gun sat heavy in his pyjama pocket, where it has been since he made himself sick with vodka and failed to do anything meaningful with it the night before. His head is killing him, and it’s hard to say if it’s from the alcohol or from all that crying. 

Valery would sorely love to stop crying. It’s sending him loopy, refocusing his attentions on all the wrong places. His daughter, his cat, the poison in his bone marrow that he will never recover from, did they let Khomyuk live, is Boris still alive? The things he cannot fix are holding him hostage. He only has one task left, get the word out. Then this can all be over. 

And yet he keeps waking up in the morning to the sound of his alarm like he has anywhere to be. He still looks to the door every time footsteps pass outside in the hope that someone will stop and knock and it will be a friend. His colleagues have widely rejected him and he always did have to strain to see his family in full colour, but maybe Khomyuk would make it. If anyone has the balls to break his unofficial and totally unquestionable embargo on his past life, it’s her. 

Memories of meetings on dingy stairwells, of the cell that he used his party privileges to drag her out of, of the last conversation they had sat at his kitchen table, are all he has of her. He never once saw her in the sun. And he has the audacity to presume that she would think him worth it, that he might be special. No. Valery has always been lonely, his perspective on this is warped. 

Boris though, is presumably still in Moscow, if he hasn’t gone gentle into that good night just yet. Boris, who mattered most, evaporating from Valery’s life in the space of a sentence. Valery could find him. Say sorry. Say: I should have told you to go, that first day when we arrived in Pripryat. I’m sorry I didn’t care enough then. I hope you live.

The worst the KGB can do is put a bullet in his brain in recompense. That's not a reason to stay in the shadows, no reason at all. 

A bullet in his brain. And then this can all be over. The tapes are only half finished but who is he kidding? He’ll be lucky to get them out the front door before they disappear under mysterious circumstances. 

Valery pulls a cigarette from his pyjama pocket and lights it up. His belongings will be calcified in a layer of nicotine by the time he’s ready to pack it all in. On a whim, he pulls the gun free, holding it up in full view of the black, nondescript car parked across the street. He could shoot them, he could shoot the innocent. Whatever he’s going to do, they’ll have to move fast if they want to stop him. 

The barrel stares him down with its one blind eye. A threat and a promise. Valery is so very tired. He can feel it deep in his bones, hasn’t let up since he picked up the phone more than eighteen months ago and knew, like geese know when to head south for winter, knew that something was deeply wrong.

Knew like he knows that Boris isn’t dead yet and they will never see each other again. 

Later he will argue with himself over whether his finger slipped or he meant it, but in the split second where he squeezes the trigger and it feels like the consequences of his actions are inevitable, Valery doesn’t mind either way. It takes him forgetting himself, and forgetting his place in all this, and the best part of a minute, before he realises that the gun has jammed and he is still very much alive. 

His life will be remembered as a series of successes tempered by all the things he couldn’t quite get right. In the aftermath, Valery feels foolish for thinking that he might deserve to get this all over with, once and for all. 

The tapes are only half finished. 

The gun falls back into his pocket with a sigh and Valery starts making himself a pot of tea to play house with before he switches to hard liquor sometime woefully short of lunch. He sits himself at the table and pulls open his papers. Tired and ill and fighting a headache that wants to cave his skull in. But fuck all that. He has work to do, he can sleep when he’s dead. 

**Author's Note:**

> Depressing fact of the day: The suicide attempt that ended his life was not Valery Legasov's first
> 
> This work was originally posted as part of a multi chaptered 'whumptober' fic that I'm trying to split up. If you think you've read it before, you probably have
> 
> Comments on the previous posting of this fic (just ask if you want me to remove yours) include:
> 
> >cutestormsloth: So sad and beautiful! Thank you  
> >>Merixcil: Thank you!


End file.
